Pedantry Quotes

“If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.

What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.”
― William Barrett

“Mere springs and coils produced the inward movements of our clockwork man. He might be termed a Puritan. One essential dislike, formidable in its simplicity, pervaded his dull soul: he disliked injustice and deception. He disliked their union—they were always together—with a wooden passion that neither had, nor needed, words to express itself. Such a dislike should have deserved praise had it not been a by-product of the man’s hopeless stupidity. He called unjust and deceitful everything that surpassed his understanding. He worshiped general ideas and did so with pedantic aplomb. The generality was godly, the specific diabolical. If one person was poor and the other wealthy it did not matter what precisely had ruined one or made the other rich: the difference itself was unfair, and the poor man who did not denounce it was as wicked as the rich one who ignored it. People who knew too much, scientists, writers, mathematicians, crystalographers and so forth, were no better than kings or priests: they all held an unfair share of power of which others were cheated. A plain decent fellow should constantly be on the watch tor some piece of clever knavery on the part of nature and neighbor.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I am nothing if not misanthropic," declared Sebastian.
"I think you mean philanthropic," said Henry.
"God, you are so perdantic."
"That would be pedantic."
"See! You're even perdantic about the word perdantic.”
― Kevin Ansbro, The Fish That Climbed a Tree

“M. Proust was more severe than M. de Caillavet on Anatole France: "He was selfish and supercilious. He had read so much that he had left his heart in other people's books, and all that remained was dryness. One day I asked him how he came to know so much. He said, 'Not by being such a handsome young man as you. I wasn't in demand, and instead of going out I studied and learned'.”
― Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust

“Would I fortify myself against the fear of death, it must be at the expense of Seneca: would I extract consolation for myself or my friend, I must borrow it from Cicero.  I might have found it in myself, had I been trained to make use of my own reason.  I do not like this relative and mendicant understanding; for though we could become learned by other men's learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“At Columbia and far beyond, T.D. was renowned and celebrated. At the weekly research seminars I attended ... every speaker felt compelled to focus on him; as they spoke, their eyes fixated only on him, and he let no statement he did not fully agree with pass hi by. No matter who lectured at the seminar, T.D. concentrated intensely on their argument, and interrupted at the first instant something was not satisfactory. At times he broke in on the initial sentence of the talk, refusing to let a speaker proceed until the point was clarified. Sometimes clarification never came; I once witnessed the humiliation of a visiting postdoc who was forced to defend the first sentence he uttered for the entire hour and a half allowed for his seminar. No one dared restrain T.D.”
― Emanuel Derman, My Life As A Quant: Reflections On Physics And Finance

“Era uno de esos pedantes que tanto abundaban a la sazón, siervos del paganismo resucitado, de quienes Erasmo se mofa porque sólo consideraban verdaderamente latinas las palabras que Cicerón incluyó en su léxico.”
― Manuel Mujica Láinez, Bomarzo

“Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy in religion - a form of knowledge without the power of it.”
― Joseph Addison

“Language pedantry is snobbery and snobbery is prejudice,” [Deborah] Cameron says. “And that IMHO, s nothing to be proud of.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“I don't judge other people for doing what they need to do. But you know what sex does? It makes oxytocin. Bonding hormones. Running around your system willy-nilly and making things all warm and fuzzy. Anyone who thinks that they can have sex more than once without catching at least some kind of feelings is delusional, because catching feelings is biology."
I put my hands up. "OK, Einstein, I take your point."
"Einstein wasn't a biologist."
I laughed, all disbelief. "I'm telling you that I want to be naked in your bed, and you're being a smartass?"
She blushed. "Stating facts isn't smartassery. It's pedantry.”
― Sarah Chamberlain, The Slowest Burn